Time is of the essence for getting out those precious Xbox 360s in time for every kid's holiday dream, so IBM has ramped up production of its custom-designed microprocessors for the new Microsoft gaming box. The chip itself features three of a customized version of IBM's 64-bit PowerPC core, each one with two simultaneous threads and clock speeds greater than 3GHz. It's also got 165 million transistors and is fabricated using IBM's 90-nanometer technology to reduce heat and improve performance. And the chip's 21.6GB-per-second front side bus architecture was customized to meet the throughput and latency requirements of the Xbox 360 gaming platform software.

Of course, IBM doesn't take sides. It's also working on another processor for Sony's PS3, the Cell, with Sony and Toshiba.